“Fez falta o amigo, a professora...”: experiência escolar e pandemia em narrativas de crianças

Abstract

This study joins a body of research which, at the present time, is dedicated to understanding the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic beyond its public health dimensions and turns to understanding the effects of this global health emergency on children and schools. From this perspective, this research poses the following question: how has the interruption in the socialization process impacted the learning process of children during the covid-19 pandemic, considering their own narratives? The general objective is to understand how the interruption in the socialization process has affected the children's learning process during the pandemic. Our focus centers on exploring the narratives constructed by the children themselves concerning the interruption of their school experiences. The specific objectives encompass: to investigate the correlation between social interaction and learning process, drawing upon Jean Piaget's theory of the equilibration of cognitive structures as a guiding framework; Through mapping, to investigate how the field of research dedicated to examining educational impacts of the pandemic is currently being designed, particularly focusing on the social and cognitive dimensions; and, finally, by employing the focus group methodology, to conduct empirical research to analyze the influence of the abrupt disruption in children’s socialization process amid the covid-19 pandemic on their learning process. In furtherance of these goals, this study involved five ten-year-old participants enrolled in the 5th grade of elementary school, in a municipal school located on the outskirts of Juiz de Fora/MG. The research is founded on Jean Piaget's Genetic Epistemology, more specifically on the theory of successive equilibration, in which we seek a possible scientific understanding of the impact of social interaction deprivation, during the covid-19 pandemic, on the child's learning process. To fulfill the proposed objectives, a comprehensive literature review and analysis of the data collected in the focus group were conducted. The results show that social isolation interrupted the child's fundamental inter-individual relationships, even impacting on their learning processes, corroborating that these are related to the way in which the child interacts with others, in other words, how they are welcomed or not on their journey of acquiring knowledge, providing them or not with elements that help them in the process of socio-cognitive balance.